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Comment by fiatmoney | Hacker News Reader

The "standard model of intelligence" is that a lot of tasks seem to have correlated (not identical) performance, and we can call the primary dimension of this relationship a "G factor", and in turn measure this implicitly with tests designed to have the same measures of correlation.

This man has a delightful british accent, which seems to count for something, but his "what is intelligence" snippet is a gigantic strawman. "You can't compare a composer and a mathematician on the same axis, they're doing different things!" No shit, jackass. What you can do, for instance, is study the relationship between measured mean population IQ and GDP, which tells you it's really important to, eg, fight IQ-lowering dietary deficiencies and heavy element poisoning if you care about helping countries develop. It's incredibly powerful as an aggregate measure.

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>"You can't compare a composer and a mathematician on the same axis, they're doing different things!". No shit, jackass.

And this outburst serves what purpose exactly? What he said could be basic and obvious, but science involves laying out the basic and obvious things first all the time. Besides, you'd be surprised how many people believe in IQ as if you CAN measure a composer and a mathematician in the same axis [1].

>What you can do, for instance, is study the relationship between measured mean population IQ and GDP, which tells you it's really important to, eg, fight IQ-lowering dietary deficiencies and heavy element poisoning if you care about helping countries develop. It's incredibly powerful as an aggregate measure.

So, essentially combine 2 dubious and much contested metrics, IQ and GDP, to make decisions. I fail to see how this can be enlightening.

Nor how anyone would need this pseudo-quantification to undertstand that "fighting dietary deficiencies and heavy element poisoning" is important "if you care about helping countries develop". Does anyone without the unique tools of IQ and GDP think that lead poisoning is good for a country?

[1] Not to mention how many have the related misguided notion that "music is math", just because music theory involves some (very basic) math relationships in it (mathematical relationships that you can summarize to a 1st year math student in a day without getting a composer out of him).

  > And this outburst serves what purpose exactly?

Who are you, to preside as an authority to chastise and admonish?

  > Does anyone without the unique tools of IQ and GDP think that lead poisoning is good for a country?

Pretty obvious that nutrition and food are powerful forces for intellect, and the aggregation of powerful intellect at scale is a powerful economy. Regardless of jargon, a well-fed, unpoisoned populace thinks cleary.

>Who are you, to preside as an authority to chastise and admonish?

I'm a commenter on Hacker News. Who said that only some higher "presiding authority" has the right to "chastise and admonish" rude behavior and name-calling on HN and the internet in general?

>Pretty obvious that nutrition and food are powerful forces for intellect, and the aggregation of powerful intellect at scale is a powerful economy. Regardless of jargon, a well-fed, unpoisoned populace thinks cleary.

Pretty obvious to me that there are far more obvious reasons for wanting a well-fed, non-poisoned populace that to get "a powerful intellect" and a "powerful economy". Basic humanism and compassion for one.

> Who are you

And who are you to chastise him for his chastisement? Feel free to ask who I am to chastise you for chastising him for chastising the other commenter, I do love these sorts of recursive finger-pointing discussions.

Yes, you are right, it is much simpler when you have just a single number to "optimize" across population. And the correlations are strong indeed. But if you want to explain more variance, you need to reach for better tools.

We are all well familiar with people's various simplified models of the world. They tend to itch hackers, because they work well enough to not be automatically rejected by their users, yet hackers know, and sometimes even have proofs, that the models are ultimately wrong. The same thing happens with IQ. We all know it is mostly bullshit, but the truth is that it does work as a rough predictor of performance. It does explain some of the variance, not all of it.

That depends entirely on what you're doing with your definition of intelligence.

Are you trying to characterize large populations of humans (presumably for economic or health reasons)?

Are you trying to advise not-quite-adult humans on what sort of work they personally are likely to be best at?

Are you trying to design systems for humans to offload the more tedious parts of their thinking to?

Are you trying to design fully autonomous systems that can pass as humans?

Are you trying to design fully autonomous systems that can interact with humans while being clearly different?

Are you trying to design systems that skilled humans working in a particular field can offload the more data-intensive parts of their thinking to?

You seem angry. Maybe David Krakauer is changing your basis set too much.

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